“Work as if you lived in the early days of a better nation.”—Alasdair Gray.

“If these are the early days of a better nation, there must be hope, and a hope of peace is as good as any, and far better than a hollow hoarding greed or the dry lies of an aweless god.”—Graydon Saunders

Sometimes the only way to find out what you think is to say it. Sometimes you surprise yourself. After a day or two of thinking over my angry post on Stalinism, I have to say that it's surprised me. I'd had no idea that my confused and ambivalent attitude to Stalinism was all along rooted in nothing but the crassest British nationalism. It has nothing to do with Trotskyism, or indeed with Marxism, the most basic elements of which must in my case have gone in one ear and out the other.

I could go through the post and try to disentangle it, but there would be very little point. Sometimes you just have to start again from the beginning.